The Elephants

It had been an uneventful ten years. Anna had secured a position in a worn wooden rocking chair that sat in the gloomiest corner of what had once been the comfortable parlour of a crumbling old house in a part of town where no one would ever notice how tall the weeds grew around it or even if it fell down. And she stayed there, slowly rocking, staring straight ahead with mouth downturned and hands clenching the armrests, until the chair had worn deep grooves into the softwood floor whose wide planks had become warped by years of damp neglect and were now sticking up in places that might have become tripping hazards for anyone with more locomotive tendencies. Sometimes she muttered to herself but it was barely audible, and had there been anyone around to hear her, they may not even have noticed that she was making a sound at all, which perhaps she wasn’t.

She rarely left the chair or the room, only at night when she made the traverse to the bedroom, which opened directly off of the parlour. An overriding concern in the reliability of her own two legs and their ability to take her anywhere superseded any hypothetical, but actually nonexistent, interest that she may have had in going anywhere. It was true the legs weren’t very stable, but whether that was due to the exceedingly old age to which she attributed it, or simple lack of use was not a question that she asked of herself.

Anna didn’t read in this gloomiest of corners, it was too dark, and she didn’t have any books anyway. But neither did she talk on the phone or listen to music or have visitors; in fact she didn’t do anything, she just sat there, day in and day out. Not because she had been abandoned in the corner, or forgotten (thought she must have been forgotten by that time), but because she really wasn’t interested in anything. She had already seen, heard, felt, known, it all. And nothing remained for her but to sit and wait. To be very still, be very quiet, be very small, and wait.

It seemed impossible that she had lived there alone for so long, hardly moving, with no contact, much less assistance from the outside world. How did she eat? Did she have water? Was there any heat in the house? Though it would have been easy to speculate about the eating of plants and roots from the overrun garden, and the occasional trapping of rodents, birds, it would have been more accurate to say that she lived on dust, stale air, and an overwhelming desire to not exist. This will seemed the most probable source of her continued survival. Had she genuinely desired to live, she likely would have long ago perished. But disdain for existence seemed to be keeping her alive. Her persistent vigour made her more and more miserable, more and more embittered. And the bitterness fed her like so many ripe lemons. It made her indestructible. It gave her the strength to wake up and curse the fates every day. It gave her the energy to walk to her rocking chair each morning. To hear the gleeful calls of life outside the window- birds chirping, bees industriously celebrating spring, wind whistling through the leaves and even cuffing a few smaller branches against the glass- and turn her face away from it. To mutter, or not mutter, to herself, day after day, that this would finally be her last.

But, it never was. There was always one more day, and then another. Her eyes narrowed, her nostrils flared and her lips were pulled in a tight line across her teeth as she became overwhelmed by anger at her impotence in the face of life. Sometimes this anger seemed to paralyse her as all of her muscles tensed and she would optimistically attribute this atrophy to her imminent demise. Alas, in vain, it was always in vain. The days kept coming, stacking themselves neatly atop one another like a cord of firewood arranged by someone with obsessive-compulsive tendencies. And as the yet to-be-lived days simultaneously queued politely before her in a long line that seemed to stretch to infinity, she couldn’t help but think that life was somehow mocking her. That its show of good manners was just thinly veiled impertinence.

Eventually, these painfully circular ideas exhausted her and she would fall into a midday nap. When she awoke, usually in the fading light of early evening, she picked up her thread of thought at the usual spot and continue her poisonous reflections until she felt that it was late enough to go to bed.

It was lucky that she never dreamt.

And so her life was and was and was and never was not.

Something had to give.

Something had to exist or not exist or happen or not happen.

One day it happened and not happened: one day a hubcap flew through her window and shattered the glass. The shards were everywhere. The hubcap rolled towards her, clattered about for a few seconds before finally coming to a stop at her feet. That was the thing that happened. She gazed at it for several long minutes, as though she had never seen a hubcap before but wasn’t particularly interested in one either; maybe she hadn’t, and she almost definitely wasn’t. But had something else occurred? Had she been jolted out of her habitual daily musings? What did the blank silence signify now, as opposed to the usual blank silence?

If anyone had been watching her, they would have been on tenterhooks to see her reaction. They would have been disappointed. And then the nothing: after several minutes of staring at the hubcap, she simply went back to her usual state of existence, rocking slowly, muttering incomprehensibly to herself. She seemed to have forgotten the incident, was impervious to the shattered glass that was scattered before her like the world’s worst blanket; like a stack of days lived that had been knocked over and fallen haphazardly across the floor.

At this point, had the disappointed viewer existed, they would surely have walked out, gone in search of more stimulating entertainment. Anna was not in the entertainment business, not by a long shot. It was a terrible business she thought, or would have thought, had she thought about it.

The next day, however, was a miserable day. Not just from Anna’s point of view. In her books, every day was just as miserable as the last. But the next day was the normal sort of miserable day. It was raining. There was a lot of wind. Cold, damp wind: the most miserable kind. It was autumn as well, so rotting leaves were blowing around and just generally making nuisances of themselves. This was not the sort of thing that would typically have affected her life in any significant way, but on this day she no longer had a window to protect her. It was a problem that might have piqued the interest of last night’s disenchanted audience. The drapes were still there, but they weren’t really up to the task of keeping the weather at bay. They were not professional in their dealings with the outside elements. No one could have blamed them for allowing the wind and rain to make the room so disagreeable for Anna. The fact was that they were becoming pretty threadbare as well.

She noticed the problem at once, and looked towards the former window, perplexed. Then she looked over at her rocking chair, still puzzled. She could not reconcile the rocking chair with the bad weather that now touched it. It was not correct.

The obvious solution would have been to relocate the rocking chair to another room in the house. But, she was so frail, she told herself. She couldn’t very well start moving furniture around at her age, could she? And, she had been so long accustomed to living exclusively between the parlour and bedroom that she could no longer recall where any of the other rooms in the house were, or if they even existed. Now that she thought about it, she really couldn’t recall anything about this house where she had lived for so long. What and where it was, or how she had come to be there. All she knew was that she had to find some new part of it that wasn’t cold and wet. Maybe something with a chair.

She looked around her, really looked. She registered for the first time the faded, peeling wallpaper, mildewed in so many places. She saw the poverty and desperation of the worn rug that was trying to hold the floorboards down. The tiny, broken table in the corner was a stranger to her. And then she saw a doorway, a different one that didn’t go to her bedroom. She quickly realized that it was through this long forgotten portal that she would have to pass if she were to carry out her search. It was an unappealing prospect. She felt so tired, so infinitely tired just thinking about it. But she knew too that there was no other option, and that perhaps the effort would be more than her antiquated heart could bear. This hope was like a jolt of adrenaline.

She moved. Slowly. Her little shuffling gait made it seem as though her feet were somehow attached to the floor. When she passed over the long neglected threshold she had the impression that it heaved a great sigh of relief. Suddenly its existence had been reaffirmed. It had a purpose again. It was as though, after all those years of her proximity and indifference, it had begun to seriously question its’ identity. What was a doorway if it went nowhere? What was a threshold that was never crossed? And all the while it had daily borne witness to her crossing of another doorway, what torment that must have been!

She began to feel an unbearable kinship with the doorway. It was like her: completely alone, decrepit, awaiting non-existence, or questioning whether or not it had already achieved it. She wondered if she wasn’t doing it more harm than good by passing through it again. Wouldn’t it have been better to let it fade into nothingness? Perhaps her passage would imbue it with a false sense of purpose.

But now it was too late. She was already through to the other side, and they were no longer bound to one another.

These musings made her think of the rocking chair that, for the first time in countless days, was abandoned. Would it lose its’ sense of self, without her there to make it an object of use? Perhaps now it could become one with the vast grey boredom of the house, of the world.

She stopped to rest, and looking around her, put aside the question of what obligation she was under to the chair. She was in a sort of small, nondescript hallway, a no-account foyer. Its’ peeling, filthy wallpaper was different from the one in the parlour, but she couldn’t say how; perhaps it was the pattern, or maybe it was the color. It may even have been both. She somehow felt even older than she had in the parlour. This thought cheered her immeasurably.

She let her gaze slide along the wall until it came to another doorway, and then, another. Two doorways! In such a small hallway, she wouldn’t have thought it possible, especially with the third that stood used and wasted behind her. Both doors ahead of her looked the same. She tried to think about where hallways led but couldn’t seem to remember much about them. It frustrated her now, to have lived a hundred years and still lack the wisdom to open a door.

She was worried about the repercussions of making a decision. She rested against the wall for a moment. Will I be destroyed in the next moment? She asked herself. This question was almost a mantra of hers and she thought it daily and without thinking.

Two doors. One to the left, and one to the right.

She shuffled slowly towards the door on the left.

It was locked. Locked in her own house (if this was indeed her house, of course, which it must have been), how could that be?

She did a little side shuffle, at which the viewer, were they still there, would have had to laugh. It looked like a strange little dance step performed by someone with weights tied around their ankles, and far too many knees.

She tried the right door, and it opened.

Of course it opened.

Her hand was brown with thick grime from the doorknob. All of the dust that she had disturbed in her trundling was swirling around her and she let out a series of short, sharp sneezes. Finally, she thought, influenza! How long she had waited for it. Pleased with the notion, she passed into a room that was a little bigger than the long lost parlour. It had a large window that was still intact, but the drapes that framed it on either side were in tatters. They were some sort of brown colour but it was difficult to tell whether or not they had started out that way. There were two or three things in the room, but they were covered in once white sheets, so she could not immediately perceive what they were. They looked like lumpy little partygoers that had fallen asleep under a tent which had subsequently collapsed on top of them without disturbing their slumber.

All of a sudden she began to wonder if it would be unbearable to see another person, or if it was the only thing that she wanted. The trouble was, she could see, that all of this adventuring and moving about had disturbed her habitual train of thought. Normally it just lumbered through her mind in much the same way day after day after day. Today the rails had been disrupted, sabotaged, and she knew not where her little train was taking her. But she couldn’t let it upset her. It had been a good conveyance all of this time and to abandon it now would be folly in the extreme. It was best to just try and ride out the storm, and wait for it to find its’ own track again. Once the problem with the chair and the wind and the rain had been resolved, the everyday route would be restored and resumed and life would be as boring and uneventful as it had ever been, with no more upsetting questions about things long and best forgotten.

This reassuring thought brought her back to the task at hand. She had not ventured all of this way into unknown territory for the sake of curiosity. She had come about a chair, and a window. Ah, for a chair! She was exhausted from the effort of her foray. Her best hope now, she felt, was to look under the white sheets. She could see from their shapes that none of the sheets were harboring rocking chairs, but there was the possibility of an armchair, and that would not have been unpleasant to her.

She shuffled closer to the lumps. She was planning the action she would take against the largest of them. It was block like. Its’ sheet was browning gray with dust, and where it sagged, some small debris had pooled: mostly dead insects and bits of dirt. She bent down with some effort and clawed for a handle of it. When she felt it firmly within her grasp, she righted herself, pulling on the sheet in the process. She could see it sliding towards her. It made a dry, rustling noise, like leaves blowing over pavement, but more fluid. The sheet was stiff with age and dirt and gave up its position reluctantly. It was sorry to abandon its charge, the object it had protected for years but it could see that it was time for it to go out into the world. It couldn’t stay hidden forever, after all. It had been made to do whatever it did, and not to keep a drop sheet company. The drop sheet would have to fend for itself now.

Finally, or so it seemed to the unhappy Anna, the sheet was removed, and what was revealed beneath it was not entirely clear. It wasn’t exactly a chair, and it wasn’t exactly not a chair. It looked like it was a chair skeleton. Perhaps it was the remains of a chair that had been eaten by vermin. Or maybe it was the victim of spontaneous combustion.

This was a disappointment. More sheets would have to be moved, more precious energy expended in the effort.

Carry on, carry on Anna, your invisible audience awaits; assuming it’s followed you in from the foyer.

The next lump to be unearthed was a low, useless table. There were various bits of rubbish floating around with it, some of the room’s flotsam and jetsam that had washed up around the shore of the sheet.

The last significant object to be finally revealed was almost against the wall. It was sort of tallish, narrow, revealed to be an old-fashioned roll top desk. Though unimpressive, it was probably the best thing that the room had been harboring. She felt sorry for the sheets’ years of wasted efforts, hoarding such useless items as though they were precious objects. But how could a sheet have known? Every sheet is made as foolish as the other; regardless of waft, weave, size, color or position. Even if a sheet could choose its’ own destiny, it’s doubtful that it would select wisely.

But back to this desk: it certainly wouldn’t help Anna. It wasn’t what she needed. She hadn’t found anything of what she needed. But what did she need? She had survived with nothing for so long, couldn’t she conceivably make do with even less? Less than nothing? Was it possible, she mused, for a hundred, maybe thousand year old human to survive on a negative amount of things? To have a negative number of needs? Maybe that was what she needed from this room, from the sheets and lumps that had given all of their uselessness to her so willingly: the entire nothing they could offer. She needed to not need the chair anymore, to slough it off like so much dead skin on a dehydrated garden snake. Why had it been so important to her, this arrangement of sticks and screws and probably a bit of carpenter’s glue? Why had she wanted to rid herself of herself but been unwilling to rid herself of a place to sit?

Maybe the whole house had to go. She had to negative need that too. Maybe.

It was a lot to process. It was difficult for her to think because she had thought the same thought for so long that her mind seemed to have rusted into that position. Her brain was like a track in the forest that had been worn down for years and years until it was too deeply etched into the earth to even see the trees over the sides, much less climb out.

Here was the desk again. It was also made of sticks and screws and maybe glue and maybe a few nails. Some long repressed tingle of curiosity made her wonder what was inside. She started to roll up the front, and slowly it revealed its contents.

What was she expecting? Impossible to say.

What did she find? Mouse droppings. A mouse had been living there. She wondered how the mouse had gained access to the desk. There must have been a hole in the back somewhere. She peered into the dark recesses of the desk, looking for the telltale opening, and saw, on the uppermost shelf, a glimmer of light. Odd, she thought, that the mouse could have gotten in there, but really, it would have been odd no matter where the mouse had found an entrance because the desk was perched on high, spindly legs, a daunting climb for many small rodents.

She reached into the desk, trying to see if the hole could be real. But the hole had disappeared, no, wait it was there again, in a flash. She peered in. She caught a glimpse of a very beautiful face. It would have been difficult to describe the beauty and do it justice, but suffice to say that she was one of those glowing visages that is impossible to duplicate and makes any other face, no matter how beautiful, seem to wilt and fade in its’ presence. It was a face that had not known the ravages of everyday life, had none of the lines that were the scars of having felt and expressed joy. It was a frozen mask of youthful perfection.

Was it the mouse? How could such a breathtaking human face belong to a mouse that lived in a roll top desk?

She realized that the flash of light from the desk was not the product of a hole but of a reflective surface. It was a mirror, smudged and grimy but unmistakable.

She looked into the mirror in her mind, suddenly self conscious about the state of her ruined self. She saw her old flesh dress in tatters. Faded, torn, worn thin. It had infected the cloth dress she wore with shabbiness as well. It was frayed and grayed and falling apart. I’m sorry, she told the dress, you didn’t deserve this. I’ve made a fool of you. She couldn’t find the right words to apologise to the fragments of fabric.

There must have been someone behind her, she thought. Alarmed yet not alarmed, she slowly turned, and saw the empty room she had always known was there.

Always known but never met. She could feel the owner of the exquisite face there. Maybe the face belonged to the room. How odd that of two rooms in one fading dilapidated house, one contained the living remains of an ancient woman of indefinite age, while the other housed a disappeared girl with no body who had achieved aesthetic perfection fixed in time and the corners of a roll top desk.

And to never have met until now! With unexpected insight, Anna realized that it was the girl who had called her here, to this room. She had been the one to fling the hubcap through the window. She now clearly remembered seeing the image of the girl reflected in the face of the hubcap as it had rested at her feet. Somehow it had not registered at the time. Certainly she had noticed it, why else had she gazed at the reflective interloper for several moments?

This girl, this desk, this room, wanted something from her. But she could not yet fathom what it might be. They had waited patiently for her. It must be something important, she thought. And yet, I have nothing to give, you have nothing to gain. I have nothing to get, you have nothing to lose. So what do you want? She asked the room.

There was no reply.

And then Anna knew what they wanted, what the face in particular sought from her. The face desired to be free. They must have all planned it for years. The desk and the room had insisted, been adamant that the face did not belong among them. There were better things than this; she was too young and beautiful to be wasted in this decaying house. At first she had protested, reiterating the impossibility of the endeavor. She was just a face after all, where would she go and why and how could she ever get there? But she could never get them to see logic. They had been at an impasse for centuries. And then, one day, they told her: there is a way. There is a hundred thousand year old woman who wiles away her days with spiteful thoughts in the other room. In this very house, she is waiting. She is finished. We will call her here, she is so weak, she won’t be able to resist. She will take you out of here. The face must have been shocked, to learn that for millennia she had been living next to another person of whose existence she had been completely ignorant. And though she continued to say that it would be unfeasible, a seed of hope had taken hold and begun to grow within her. Because, despite insisting that to leave the house was an unattainable dream, she had come to want that above all else.

But where had they found the hubcap? How had they convinced it to be a part of their conspiracy?

No matter, it was done now. And Anna began to find herself drawn in by the face’s beauty. She started to feel that, like the hubcap, she too would become a willing participant in this escape plot. She knew it was madness from which no good could come, that it was all the things she had said she would never do. That, at her age! Enough said. But, the face was so disarming in its silence and fragility. In its evident sadness. She wished it no harm, and somehow wanted to unharm it all of the harm that it had ever experienced.

She needed a moment away from the part of her that couldn’t wrench its gaze from the small grimy mirror at the back of the desk. She needed to confer with herself.

Let go eyes, let go. I need to think without you, she said.

How could she see so clearly all of a sudden, Hyperopia, have you abandoned me now? She asked. Perhaps, she was already seeing through the eyes of the face. Maybe it had already begun the theft of her.

She knew that of course she would agree. It had always been like this, perhaps she had known for years. Now the signs seemed so obvious that it was hard to believe that she hadn’t figured it out long ago. The hallway, the drop sheet. No mouse could have climbed into the desk! No cars ever drove by! How foolish she had been to be taken in by such an obvious ruse.

She could feel their apologies, the wall the room the face. They hadn’t wanted to deceive her, but they had had to be ruthless.

I understand, you were right, all of you. You deserve me more than I do, if that’s what you want, she told them. She wondered if they bought her sincerity or if they were wondering if she bought theirs or if anyone knew that all of them were in utter earnest.

They all knew, she knew, after a moment. We all know.

She opened her eyes but they were already open, so she closed them and then opened them. The face was still in the mirror. She wondered what the face’s name was, and the room seemed to have divined her question: Her name is Anna.

That was a coincidence, wasn’t it?

But, nevermind, it was time to begin. The introductions were complete. She knew that she had to go outside, to take other Anna out there. But what were the logistics of going out? How was it done? The room and the wall and other Anna would be of no help on this one. They knew nothing about the outside.

She knew she knew, or had known at some point. But she couldn’t bring outside into focus. Her memories, what was left of them, weren’t lining up properly. She had been outside before, that was certain. She had somehow come to this house, but how?

No, that’s enough, Anna, stop stalling, it’s no use pretending that this is not going to be resolved in exactly the way that everyone expects it to be. Look, the rain has stopped, there’s even a bit of sunshine. You are going to walk through the other door, and after you do, it will be done, you will be out of the house, and you will be outside. Perhaps the out of doors will cause you to disintegrate, or maybe it will make you stronger. We will find out in one moment.

Anna obediently walked to the door that was next to the window. She turned the knob. It wasn’t locked. She opened it. She again felt the cool breeze that she had met for the first time in years when her window had been shattered by the hubcap. She smelled the freshness of the air. Everything was so bright, she had forgotten about that. The wind was like a bath. It was blowing the dust from her clothes and hair. It was slapping her across the face, trying to wake her up after all of these years.

Hey! You are still alive!

She knew it now. It was surprising. It was nice. She felt funny. Not angry, what did that mean?

The ground was slippery from that morning’s rain. She shuffled carefully forward, though somehow her shuffle was becoming less of one and more of a walking step. She hadn’t noticed yet. Perhaps other Anna’s influence was to blame for that.

Was this what other Anna had expected? Wondered Anna. Had other Anna any idea of what it would be like out here?

But other Anna was by now drunk with exhilaration. After all this time! This is what it had all been building up to: this air, this freshness, this only the beginning. She would never let Anna take her back into that house. She was never ever going back there. That place was a prison, she silently whispered to Anna.

Anna didn’t look back at her prison. She didn’t love it, not by any means. It was the opposite that made her long for it. It was the beauty of the outside that scared her because she didn’t know if she could hate it. In fact, she feared that she wouldn’t ever be able to.

How could other Anna, in her youth and ignorance, be so sure about what she was doing? Was it possible that other Anna had just naturally arrived at the right conclusions? Was it also possible that Anna, despite all of her deliberate deconstructions, had arrived at the wrong ones? Or perhaps it was because of her elaborate thought processes that she was now in possession of all of the wrong answers? She was wondering, for the first time in years, if she had perhaps wasted something.

Could the fresh air have affected her so much, so quickly? Was it laced with some narcotic? Were her wits being addled or untangled?

Just tell yourself that I don’t exist, said other Anna, and I won’t. Don’t you see how easy it is? You of all people should know how to forget. I won’t hold it against you

Anna knew, but what did that mean? She didn’t think she would be able to forget, perhaps because other Anna was the one who would tell herself that Anna didn’t exist. Then they would both have what they wanted, wouldn’t they?

Maybe. Said other Anna. So then what do I owe you, what is the total debt?

Anna wasn’t sure. It depended, she thought, on what she would take and what she would give.

But it’s already done, said other Anna, you gave me this thing and I gave you that other thing. Now I have this walk outside, this one that never turns back, and now you have this waiting to be wasted face. And it will find some things for you, for me. Don’t be angry, I never meant to destroy you. Just try it on for a little while. I will be here or not be here. You will be me or not me; it’s very hard to say.

Anna opened her mouth and tried to speak. She didn’t have anything in particular that she wanted to say, she just wanted to explain something one last time, even if it meant nothing.

But just then the unexpected appearance of another human being made Anna realize that it was all over.

The stranger approached, and, exclaiming at the apparition that was Anna/other Anna, felt an overwhelming desire to save her. Just like that she was rescued from decrepit old age. Perhaps she had always known that it would come to this. She had no choice. The world freely offered itself to her. It rolled in ecstasy at her feet.1

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1 After Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, Fourth Notebook